Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not life.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

I (e)published a book!

The book that I scanned last year (Short Papers on Church History, Vol. 1 by Andrew Miller) is in the process of being made available through the Kindle Direct Publishing program. It should take a day or two to make its way across the various Amazon servers, I understand, but should then be available worldwide.

The scanning of the book itself, thanks to the new scanner (an Epson Perfection V500) was actually pretty quick - and ABBYY FineReader software converted it into a single file with few glitches. What took the time was the process of effectively proof-reading the whole book. What had to be done?

I had to try and pick up what are known as "scannoes" - the OCR equivalent of typos;

I wanted to impose a consistent style across the whole book that would work with things like the generation of a table of contents, and how it would be presented on a Kindle;

I wanted to make sure that all italicised text was converted properly;

I wanted to consistently replace (for example) ' with ‘ or ’ as appropriate, and where necessary ae with æ;

There were the odd bursts of Greek characters!

So it turned into a time-consuming process - and as I say in the foreword, I'm pretty sure that I've not done it perfectly, so I may need to re-upload at some stage.

Anyway, if you're interested, the first place that you can find a link to the book is here. I'll add the UK address once it becomes available. I am intending to charge for the book, by the way - but only about £1.